Month: January 2017

Once a year my friends insist on celebrating my closing death with presents and cake. My almost-mother-in-law is a really good painter so this year I dared asking her to paint a Bonsai for me to keep with tradition. To assist I sent her some photos of Bonsai I really loved, most by Walter Pall obviously, and almost forgot about it.

Well that’s a lie…

I thought about it every week eagerly anticipating what she would come up with. A while ago she showed me some pictures of her progress, and jolly joy she’s not making one, but two paintings! They are not yet finished, and the photos are not perfect, but I couldn’t resist showing them already, off course I’ll post the final product too.

The first one is of one of Walter Pall’s most famous trees. I wish I had trees like him, I wish I had half the talent and was half as original as this man is. If you don’t know who he is, then you should really visit his website www.walter-pall.de if you love Bonsai. I won’t post the original photos of this tree here because they are obviously Walters property, but I urge you to visit his site and watch his galleries if you haven’t done so already. To me Walter is the most important man in European Bonsai, the creator of a new style, an honest and outspoken man who dared to go his own way instead of imitating like so many others do. I think this painting grabs the understated power and simplicity of this tree very well. Making it almost monochrome is the mark of an artist, this tree, and this painting doesn’t need more colour in any way.

The second one is a tree she photographed herself while visiting Japanese gardens. Technically the tree itself is not as prime an example of Bonsai as the one above, which is obvious seeing the one above is one of the best ever European Bonsai, but a very quiant little tree regardless. It does have good movement and grabs the eye, with the pot and the contrast it makes for an exemplary painting. I especially like the shading and detail of the trunk, very convincing in an impressionistic way. The texture and colour of the pot is spot on. The more I look at it the more I like it, the tree itself, and the painting.

If you’re interested in having your own Bonsai painting, a portrait or an original work of her own mind. Please don’t hesitate and visit this talented artist at www.mthattink.nl

Winter is in full swing so growing Bonsai is a bit of a contradiction now, keeping them alive is a term that applies more at the moment. There’s enough to say about Bonsai but when they’re not growing outside I tend to lose interest a bit. They are cold outside and talking about them won’t change that, so I’d rather create something else while we wait for spring. Another hobby of mine is one that has a habit of popping up then, building scale models. Just leave it to me to find something even more elderly and uncool as growing Bonsai in your early thirties. Ah well, from now on one or two finished models might also pop up here. I’ll try my best to keep the blog mostly Bonsai oriented though.

To start things off I’d like to show a build I almost threw in the bin a few years ago but finished regardless. Just a simple aluminium plane in flight, I like the elegant but powerful form the Thunderbolt has. The scale is 1:48, painting is done by airbrush. Getting an aluminium finish like this is more difficult than you’d think so I’m actually a bit proud of this one 🙂

Like with Bonsai, making a good photo of one of these is almost as hard as building one.